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The game "Spot It!" is played with a deck of cards in which every pair of cards has exactly one matching symbol and the aim is to be the fastest at finding the match. It is known that finite projective planes correspond to decks in which…

Consider a 4-player version of Matching Pennies where a team of three players competes against the Devil. Each player simultaneously says "Heads" or "Tails". The team wins if all four choices match; otherwise the Devil wins. If all team…

We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…

Lights Out is a single-player electronic handheld game from the 1990s that features a 5 by 5 grid of light-up buttons. The game begins with some lights on and others off. The goal is to turn off all lights but pressing a button changes its…

Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…

We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$,…

Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…

This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…

We study multi-player turn-based games played on (potentially infinite) directed graphs. An outcome is assigned to every play of the game. Each player has a preference relation on the set of outcomes which allows him to compare plays. We…

In Zombies and Survivors, a set of zombies attempts to eat a lone survivor loose on a given graph. The zombies randomly choose their initial location, and during the course of the game, move directly toward the survivor. At each round, they…

We investigate concurrent two-player win/lose stochastic games on finite graphs with prefix-independent objectives. We characterize subgame optimal strategies and use this characterization to show various memory transfer results: 1) For a…

Consider the following game between a random player R and a deterministic player D. There is a pile of n elements at the beginning. The rules for playing are as follows: In each turn of R, if the pile contains exactly m elements, R removes…

We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite graph for infinitely many rounds. Stochastic games generalize both Markov decision processes (MDP) by adding an adversary player, and two-player deterministic games by adding…

We consider the repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD). We assume that players make their choices knowing only average payoffs from the previous stages. A player's strategy is a function from the convex hull $\mathfrak{S}$ of the set of payoffs…

This paper is about simulating the spread of opinions in a society and about finding ways to counteract that spread. To abstract away from potentially emotionally laden opinions, we instead simulate the spread of a zombie outbreak in a…

In a guessing game, players guess the value of a random real number selected using some probability density function. The winner may be determined in various ways; for example, a winner can be a player whose guess is closest in magnitude to…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. A ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards, where one after…

In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…

This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…

Penney's game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose…